With an audience that is exclusively 50 and older, AARP’s core membership might seem more traditional than consumers of other brands. But the advocacy group is just as interested as other marketers in collecting and employing data to improve communications with members and other marketing efforts.

Its latest innovation: making data a key part of its strategy. The nonprofit has added “data strategy” to its corporate dashboard. However, like most other firms trying to navigate the data flood, challenges remain for AARP.

Lynn Mento, senior VP-membership at AARP, discusses the nonprofit’s decision to focus more seriously on data, and explains the difficulties of balancing privacy concerns with data access.